Growing up, my family was never into politics. Any politics that I happened to notice came from my public school teachers. Really, I didn’t start noticing much until about high school, and only then to try to figure out why some of my friends got so annoyed when the American History teacher constantly referred to Nixon as “tricky Dick”.

When I was getting close to the end of my college years, I started paying attention, and doing my own research. I began to realize how much bull had been shoveled into my head, politically, at the hands of most (not all) of my teachers up through high school. Of course, I hadn’t realized it then, and that’s the way the left wants it.

For instance, whenever I would think of the civil rights era - MLK Jr., the marches, the hoses, the dogs, etc, I always assumed that it was the Republicans who were at fault for the way the marchers were treated. Just listening to the media would prove how raaaacist the Republicans are, and how they hate anyone that doesn’t share their skin color.

Upon researching those events, and finally learning the truth about history, I realized that the man that had turned the dogs loose, and opened the hoses was Eugene “Bull” Connor (Democrat). How can that be? History has been whitewashed by the liberals in this country (the ones in charge of writing the history books, reporting the news, teaching our kids).

Its time for liberals to own up to their role in race relations in the U.S. Seriously folks, don’t you get tired of using the same old tired excuses, and name calling when trying to pin the blame on Conservatives? I can already hear the argument coming from the left…”those Democrats left the party and joined up with the raaaacist Republicans!!!” Well, here is an interesting article written by a conservative black man (Bob Parks) that spells out the Democrat role throughout the history of our country.

I know, I know, I can hear the next thing coming…”he’s an Uncle Tom! he’s a sellout!” I find it interesting that liberals have to start name calling again, and always against conservative black people who have seen the light and can think for themselves. I thought liberals didn’t have anything to do with treating minorities that way…I thought it was just those raaaacist conservatives.

How does the Republican party fix the image problem trumped up by liberals? Well, here are two good reads that might be a good start. First, is Vassar’s idea to start holding the media responsible. Second, is an article from a conservative black woman (baldilocks) that explains why blacks have flocked to the Democrat party, and what Republicans can do to win them back.

Lastly, I will continue illustrating the truth about racial politics in our history. Next up, the founding of the KKK…

I have a relatively narrow point to make, but it does take some setting up. I hope you’ll indulge me.

At the end of the Civil War, the center of the “American Doctrine of Liberty” which forms the corpus of conservatism in America today was found in the northeast, the Yankee homeland. That’s right. Boston, New York, Philadelphia. (Catch your breath, it’s true.)

How it moved on is interesting. It left the northeast because they first became secular, which, if you know much about the Anglican church in America, hasn’t really been all that difficult for over a century. Moreover, over the span a generation, 1870s-1910, academe in the northeast (and other education centers) began to move away from the homegrown doctrines of liberty in favor of foreign (English and German) theories, e.g., Hegel and Marx, thanks to John Dewey and others. By the Wilson era constitutional and religious conservatism had become de classe in almost all the northeast, and in most of academe east of the Mississippi. Even in Atlanta, you just weren’t “in” unless you were “in” to Dewey.

But they were still Republicans. This is why I am less sanguine than most of you about the moderate nature of RINO’s in the northeast. This is the secular world they’d been born into for over 90 years. They can’t help it. In ideals about liberty, the founders’ vision, the common man, they are as childlike and innocent as the third generation mom who takes her welfare check into 7-11 to buy lottery tickets. I always cut people some slack who “don’t know nothing about nothing.” (Hodge). In fact, the Shoshones would have paid them no mind at all, and simply given them some buffalo sinew and bone needles, and left them in camp to sit around with the squaws and chew buffalo hides while the men were out hunting.

(That said, I hope you’ll show them more Christian charity in the future. A pat on the head, and maybe a cheap copy of Edward Everett Hale’s Man Without a Country from Amazon.com, and, if they read it…who knows?)

Rushing ahead to 1980 and Ronald Reagan, his revolution caused a transformation of the Republican Party as well as re-ignited the American Doctrine of Liberty. Only it did nothing to change the northeast. Just 12 years after the riots in Chicago, the university system all over America was dominated by the by-now tenured radical leftists who were the natural spawn of what Dewey started 60 years earlier. Only sociologically and demographically (baby boomers) were they an anomaly. (There were so damned many of us.) Academically, they were right on cue.

Ronald Reagan understood the nature of communism, including its end game and natural animus toward liberty. What he could allow himself to do was look out across the gathered Congress and imagine any of their intentions were the same as Karl Marx’s. His basic belief in America made him believe they were just playing politics. On this he was wrong. And this same sense may have doomed George W Bush’s presidency, and maybe a whole generation of freedom in Amerika. Time will tell.

So, when this discarded notion of liberty from the northeast found fertile ground in the religious faiths of the South, and independence-loving West, well, the Republican Party spread south and west as well. At one time it was wall-to-wall red, from Florida to Washington. Can you remember when Colorado and New Mexico were sure-win red states? And even in the northeast Reagan found red buttons to push on the working classes and common man, even union members, i.e., patriotism, live and let live, religious freedom, family. (Button’s still there, only no one to push it.) Whether by plan or simply by good-natured humanity, he had nearly isolated the hateful-class.

It was during Reagan’s time that the Left first began raising the notion of Republican racism. This was in part because so many southern Democrats began changing parties in that period, and southern Democrats were, well, you know, racists. The only southern democrats that were forgiven this sin were those that stayed with the party, people like Robert Byrd. He’d seen the klieg(le) lights. But by definition a Republican convert could never see this light. Republicans were just cynically seeking a new home for their racial hatreds. Blah, blah, blah. You know the riff.

What Reagan didn’t do was fight back.

Maybe it was his natural good nature. Maybe it was because he thought, even through surrogates, it would be unseemly. Unpresidential. Maybe he thought we could ignore them. (In those days, I did. I was wrong.) Maybe in his deepest imagination, in his pre-internet world, he could not believe that members of Congress could be on the same revolutionary page as those Marxists who lived in the bowels of the Ivy League…and Moscow. Maybe he just thought that fight (racism) was over. We did seem to have turned a corner, you know. I was there.

What he and the GOP (Frank Fahrenkopf, who I knew), didn’t do was run a campaign reminding people that it was the Republicans who ended slavery. It was the Republicans who made the great Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s become law. Dr Martin Luther King was a Republican. Not once did they refer to the indecencies heaped on the blacks since LBJ as the “new plantation” it had in fact become. They always gave liberal “good intentions” over darker motives. They never saw the bigger game afoot.

They hoped it would all go away. None of those arguments did the GOP take to the people…and in those days it was much easier to get our message out than now. We didn’t fight back. And I know those of you who recall those days winced twice as hard when GW repeated the same mistake. So, through the print media and television mostly, the message stuck: the Republican Party had become the new home of the old Dixie-crats and the plantation-seekers, as well as the home of backward religious faith in this country. (With this combo, you can see why the northeast Republicans were so embarrassed by their new found political red-headed step cousins. What they didn’t realize is that they had become part of the plantation system themselves, the Left’s new domestic staff, house…er. They still haven’t figured out the joke had been on them all along.)

From Reagan to now, the GOP, through Bush I and II, had allowed the tags to stick, in part because the old blue blood GOP half-way believed it themselves, and two, if it came down to only two choices, class and country, they’d take class every time. Once the race label stuck, it was easy to extend it to women, gays, Latinos.

Which brings us to now. This is why I address this to both the GOP, but not only national but state parties, as well as the Tea Parties. Let’s see who steps up first.

Part Deux, the current racist-campaign

I’ve told you several times before, most of what the GOP says and does is planned for. No one ever went broke underestimating the Republican Party for clever ideas and strategies. They think this is still politics, you know, as in “when do we get our time in power again?” And considering the strident condemnations and defiance coming from the conservative internet (e.g., here at RedState) and at public sites all over the country (the Tea Parties) about Obamacare, it was fairly predictable what we would WANT TO do if it were passed. While the Tea Parties were unplanned for, I’ve also told you before, the Enemy catches on pretty quick, and they are one-two steps ahead here again.

Now they have set into motion a large multi-tiered national assault on racism within the Tea Party Movement, and have tied that to the “tacit approval” of this racism of the GOP, both at RNC and in the Congress. All based on lies. Their near-term purpose is to 1) cause the GOP to run entirely away from the Tea Parties by hanging on them the one milestone they fear most and 2) turn public sentiment against the Tea Parties. They have all their forces marshaled for this one campaign, for if they win, they can once again be secure in an electoral victory in November.

This is the sort of politics that causes the “moderate-of-spined” Republican to begin sweating in the palms of his hands, enough so that no one in the GOP will dare come on a public stage and challenge what we already know to be a fact…namely that not one single charge, from cat-calls of the n-word, or even the q-word at Barney Frank, from threats of violence or harm (did anyone hear the Stupak threats,”disgust”, “run from office”?, wow, I’m surprised he didn’t keel over in a faint…and I believe that call came from a pro-abortionist, not a pro-lifer) has ever been authenticated. Even the Perriello gas-line cutting…well, a dollar against a doughnut it was an inside job. That a Tea Partier did it is now a journalistic fait accompli even though not a single Republican would even know what such a line looks like, where the line is, or how to cut it, or even think to do it. (I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t. Now, if he’d found a live skunk in the laundry room…)

I invite you to simply Google “GOP-Racism” or “Republican Racism” or “Tea Party Racism”. In fact, do it for the next week every day or so and watch the stories proliferate. There are over 700 now. A Latino interest group has opened a new website to bring pressure to bear on the GOP. I think even Newt has started apologizing, pit bull that he is. Interestingly, at the top of page one is a July 2009 story bringing back the lie that the GOP (or Rush Limbaugh) came up with the “Barack the Magic Negro” punchline, instead of a liberal LA Times reporter named David Ehrenstein in 2007.

My advice to both the GOP and the individual Tea Parties, from Virginia to Guam:

It’s time to roll these 30 years of lies back, and in the process, restore the official record. Are you listening, Mick Steele? Or is Mickey?

Hire a full time response team to contact via email and letter EVERY offending party, from website to newspaper to television news show, that reports as fact any of these unsubstantiated charges are considered to be libelous and defamation and actionable at law. Don’t flood their email banks…yet. First send them an official letter that they have x hours to retract, not just take down, but retract, the charges,…or get a lawyer. We’ll find you.

I don’t know about the GOP “brand” but in my view it is a brand that can be protected at law. I can’t go down to Richmond and establish my own “Republican Party”. The same goes for Tea Parties. Most of them have registered with the state governments. They have names that can be protected. And certainly reputations.

For the record, I know about the high bar of proof to actually win such a case, but I’m talking about legal terrorism here. The Left has been using it for years, and often at taxpayer expense. I wouldn’t be suggesting this if we had “loser pays”, but hey, it was their idea to keep the door to the courts unlocked. And quite frankly, I’m not sure that the case law really deems to go so low as to include ordinary citizens who band together just to petition their government.

Let the Baltimore Sun have to look at not one but twenty one cases filed in state or federal court by the RNC, the state GOP, and every registered Tea Party in Maryland, for making unfounded charges of racism against them with the specific intention of causing them harm. This is also personal harm. (Even I can prove intent to do just that.) The cost should be substantial for their side to answer if they only have to show up in court once. From our side, I’ll bet I could find pro bono attorneys in every city in Virginia where a Tea Party exists. What fun, they pay and we don’t.

But extend this to the little wise-ass on his home grown website in mom’s basement. Wait til the sheriff brings the summons around to that front door. Or the union thug wives trying to pick up extra cash at home, fronting for ACORN and SEIU. What fun tracking back the “corporate veil” in those households.

This can be done inside a week. What will happen will be that the GOP and the Tea Parties, individually and not in concert, will have stolen the media thunder. They will have stolen the agenda, the campaign, and turned it back onto the Left. The media will suddenly bury the charges and the racism campaign, but not before the last thing the public knows is not that the GOP/Tea Parties have been charged with racism, but that the media and several incorporate and private web sites and persons have been sued in court for race-baiting….and those cases are pending.

And a good time was had by all.

I like it. For almost thirty years we’ve allowed this to fester. It’s time to nip it in the bud. It’s time we aggressively moved to take back the racial high ground in this country, and remind the general public, people of color, moderate Republicans, and ourselves just where the home of racial harmony is, and where the home of true racism resides. And the Left has just given us the best opportunity ever.

A few weeks back, I lambasted prominent black conservatives for even thinking of voting for Barack Obama, a man who embodies only one part of the two-word description “black conservative.”

Several black conservatives were quoted in the article to which I was responding. However, the most revealing quote came from former U.S. Representative J.C. Watts (R-OK):

J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma congressman who once was part of the GOP House leadership, said he’s thinking of voting for Obama. Watts said he’s still a Republican, but he criticizes his party for neglecting the black community. Black Republicans, he said, have to concede that while they might not agree with Democrats on issues, at least that party reaches out to them.

“And Obama highlights that even more,” Watts said, adding that he expects Obama to take on issues such as poverty and urban policy. “Republicans often seem indifferent to those things.”

Watts’ turnaround suggests one of three things to me: 1) that he has changed his political philosophy and should probably change parties; 2) that when he was running for office he was saying what he needed to say to get elected in conservative Republican Oklahoma, rather than saying that in which he believed; that is, he was never really a conservative Republican; or 3) that he realizes the futility of trying to attract most black Americans to his party on the basis of principle.

I don’t know which is the answer, but there’s a logic to Watts’ statement regarding Obama and that logic undergirds the astounding Democrat/liberal/Left success among the black electorate in contrast with the Right’s failure in the same area. The key to understanding lies in the assumptions inherent in the phrase “reaching out.” Who should reach out to whom on the basis of what? What smaller actions fall under the large umbrella of “reaching out”? Here are the blanks filled in:

1. Who: the Republican Party should do the reaching out.2. To whom: the party should reach out to the black community, that is, to black people as a singular entity — a collective.3. How: the outreach should be done on the same basis as is performed by the modern Democratic Party.1. Programs2. Policies

In short, the Republican Party must “do things” for black Americans which it does not do for other citizens and which are identical to the things which the Democratic Party does. Or better. But the Republican Party can’t be what it isn’t.

The bottom line: Republicans want black Americans to pursue happiness and the Democratic Party wants to provide happiness to black Americans.

A party and its principles

The Republican Party that Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan (re)built has not been designed to reach out to a group on the basis of identity, but on the basis of a given group’s ideas and values. By the party’s very definition — its basic principles — this precludes reaching out to groups which have race, ethnicity, and/or gender as their sole criterion for coalescing as a political entity. So when some observers wonder what the Republican Party is going to “do for” the “black community,” most Republicans will have a certain look of puzzlement on our faces, as if someone just asked why we don’t offer attachable wings so that our prospective party members can fly.

Many black Americans cannot shake the notion that a political party is supposed to provide quid pro quo. That the Republican Party won’t do anything for them besides get off their backs, get other citizens off their backs, and get out of their way so they can pursue happiness just isn’t good enough. But where did the idea come from?

That the government should step in when overt oppression is being practiced but should not help or hinder black American advancement certainly precedes Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan. And, in practice, as Bruce Bartlett (HT Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred) and La Shawn Barber point out, before the Civil War and during the century that followed the abolition of slavery, the Republican Party was responsible for several federal measures designed to protect Americans of African descent from their fellow citizens and to punctuate the basic citizenship rights guaranteed to the freed slaves and to their progeny. Fact is, however, the Republican Party would not have had a leg to stand on had not the founders of the United States based the principles in the Constitution on certain philosophies.

Obviously, black Americans were happy to receive the protection. However, after the Republicans clamped down on the racists, they (mostly) removed themselves from the equation to allow the country’s black citizens to be free. But when they did that, the nemeses fell in, masquerading as friends.

It is here that black Americans found themselves attacked from the top and from the bottom. Forty years ago most black Americans were used to being physically and socially restrained to an extent. However, what happened to black Americans in the 60s is that their enemies found a way to accomplish what the physical barriers of slavery, the legal oppression of northern segregation, and the overt terror of Jim Crow could not.

The mental chains

At the top, President Lyndon Baines Johnson — a Democrat whose pre-Kennedy legislative career had been that of a typical Dixiecrat — put forth a set of programs and policies infamously known as the Great Society, actually giving a part of the public funding to those who qualified to receive it. The bottom line? Many of the programs amounted to life subsidy — “reward” for indolence, whoredom, and irresponsibility. At the bottom, liberals, leftists, and Democrats inserted themselves wholesale into the educational processes of the black poor. That education put forth a portrait of America as a full-scale villain, which made her history unneeded — except the parts necessary to understand the crimes perpetrated on her perennial victims. With that in mind, why would liberals, leftists, and Democrats teach their captive audience about the historical role that their political opponents played in setting and keeping them free? Between the manipulation of education and the government handouts by Democrats, the Left could even convince black Americans that it was the Republicans who had actually been black America’s oppressors — and that idea, that lie, would become far more useful to the Democrats than any Great Society program, as LBJ allegedly foresaw.

An even more serious deficiency has been nurtured by the systems dominated by leftist philosophies of education, and that deficiency leads us, finally, to the answer to our question.

Too few people put enough thinking into principles — their nature or, of utmost importance, their foundation. As a matter of fact, what many people call principles aren’t really that, but are commodities — items to be bought and sold. And it is one’s principles — or one’s commodities — that inform the decision as to whom one should give his/her allegiance.

Example: consider the admonition to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Or is it “do unto others as you suspect they would do unto you”? Or “do unto others before they do unto you”? Or “do unto others as they’ve already done unto you and not one minute before they do”?

Like all other axioms, the Golden Rule has its origin in a way of thinking, a school of thought — a philosophy, in this case, biblical. One forms his/her principles from a philosophy, usually one or several taught at school and/or at home. Now I can’t speak for what is taught in all homes, only my own. However, I can authoritatively say that few bases for forming principles — as opposed to commodities — were taught at the public schools I attended in South Central Los Angeles. Barely were the particulars of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights covered. Of course we had heard the phrase “unalienable rights,” but what did that mean, really? And the men who formed these words, these ideas, and built a nation on top of them, where did they get these ideas about rights and government from? Did they just pop up, unbidden? Or were the men simply building on the philosophies of someone(s) else?

Who knew the answers to these questions? Not I; not then. Where I went to school, one was taught what to think, but not how and definitely not why. One was not taught how to build a foundation for one’s principles or that a foundation needed to be built.

Into that vacuum jump many notions, but the one specific to the subject at hand is the idea that the party which is giving you the most things — the one that will “do something for you” — is the party to which you should belong. And if “principles” have no foundation, those “principles” — and their owners — can be purchased. And though there are a few black so-called conservative Republicans out there, all too many of them — like Watts — still find themselves reverting to the “do something for us” idea, a liberal Democrat ideal. No wonder some believe that our political persuasion is grounded in advantage rather than principle.

The Democratic Party has counted on this absence — of history taught/learned and of principles adhered to — in all of its members, but most especially has it counted on this dearth in black Americans, a dearth which has allowed too many black Americans to stick themselves to the Democratic Party like glue, or chain themselves to the party like …

Juliette is a smart and faithful blogger and a published author who should have been on my blog links long ago. Omission corrected. Oh, and as it happens she is a black woman. I have Catholics and Jews and Evangelical Christians linked, I have men and women of various colors linked and you cannot tell from my links page who is Caucasian or Asian or African-American or whatever. Alphabetical order. I am not a racist and I am not a sexist, I am a conservative Christian who believes in freedom of (not from) speech and religion and peaceful assembly and that America was founded upon the Constitution and should adhere to the same. I am also a Tea Party Patriot. What the liberals do not understand is that the Tea Party movement is much like the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, a movement that was a coalition of Republicans, Independents and even some Democrats. It is not a party, the "party" in the name is a reminder of the "Boston Tea Party" and if you don't know what that is you need a refresher course in American History.The Civil Rights movement was a bunch of people who stood up and said "NO MORE RACISM. NO MORE SEGREGATION. NO MORE JIM CROW!"The Tea Party Movement is a bunch of people who stand up and say "NO MORE SOCIALISM. NO MORE TAXES. NO MORE BIG GOVERNMENT!"

The Democrats were at the root of the problem of Jim Crow (hello, Woodrow Wilson!) and they are at the root of the massive growth of government/taxes/recession/bureaucracy/deficits we are seeing now.The piece de resistance courtesy of Frances Rice:

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman's issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King's leaving Memphis, Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a "trouble-maker" who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation's fist goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.

Critics of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President against Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater also ignore the fact that Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on Jan. 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only 35 words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King's protest against the Vietnam War, Johnson referred to Dr. King as "that Nigger preacher."

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist "Dixiecrats" did not all migrate to the Republican Party. "Dixiecrats" declared that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for blacks. Today, some of those "Dixiecrats" continue their political careers as Democrats, including Robert Byrd, who is well known for having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another former "Dixiecrat" is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings, who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been "a great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Yet Democrats denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

In order to break the Democrats' stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party's economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity.

Ms. Rice is a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel, a lawyer and chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) and may be contacted at http://www.nbra.info/.

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour

The ultimate determinate in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas – a trial of spiritual resolve; the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideas to which we are dedicated — Ronald Reagan

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour